Chicago's Neofuturists lose "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind"

November 30, 2016 8:58 PM

Today, Greg Allen announced that he was letting the license lapse at the end of 2016 for the Neofuturists of Chicago to run his licensed show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Well, technically, he unilaterally announced that the show was ending via a press release, without telling the Neofuturist board or staff. The Artistic Director of the Neofuturist ensemble released a response indicating that they were blindsided.

Allen is the founder of Too Much Light and created the concept almost 30 years ago, and Too Much Light is currently Chicago's longest running theater show. Allen stepped away about four years ago, and the statement from the Neofuturists' Artistic Director implies that it was not a comfortable break: "...Throughout our long history with Greg there have been considerable artistic differences and irreconcilable personal conflicts." Some of these conflicts are explored in a Master's Thesis written in 2014 by Max D. Glenn of Ohio State University, which documents longstanding issues related to Allen's control over the group and its' evolution (among other interesting topics of Too Much Light's history).

The trademark for Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind belongs to Allen as the founder, and he notes in his statement that he intends to dissolve the show and re-brand it with a "new diverse ensemble" "comprised entirely of people of color, LBTQ+ [sic], artist/activist women, and other disenfranchised voices in order to combat the tyranny of censorship and oppression." The current company is comprised of 25% people of color, members who identify as LGBTQ, nearly 50% women, and contains members who explicitly identify as artists and activists. The work ensemble members do outside of performing Too Much Light encompasses numerous social and civic programs that use their artistic voices to partner with organizations to bring theater to traditionally excluded groups, engage young people in theater exercises to help them find their unique voices through the Urban Arts program, address individual existential crises and find the shared humanity in all of us, raise money via special shows for numerous causes including an annual show to benefit local LGBT Youth.

Other Too Much Light Ensembles, with similar demographic breakdowns, are not having their licenses pulled for Allen's re-branding.

posted by juniperesque (39 comments total)

.
posted by wotsac at 9:19 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Well thank God this guy's going to take care of the whole Trump business with his show. I was getting worried there.
posted by Naberius at 9:25 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Well, that's some shit. Guess I'll be going back sooner than I thought. Sure am glad that an older white guy is going to step in to show everyone how it's done, tho. Does anybody know if there's any reason they couldn't keep doing the same format but change the name? "Hi, we are the Neo-Futurists and welcome to Fuck Greg Allen In The Ear, a show where we attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes."
posted by protocoach at 9:29 PM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Well, that's just ducky. It's one of those shows that I had heard about for ages, and wanted to go to someday, but all the advance tickets are sold out. Thanks, Greg!
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:30 PM on November 30, 2016

My GF is involved in theater here and is following the Facebook. Seems like the reaction on the ground is "WTF?"
posted by dagosto at 9:31 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm a regular Too Much Light attendee, and the tone of this is really bizarre to me. If anything, Too Much Light over this last year has struck me as overwhelmingly political and diverse - the ensemble includes an African-American, an Asian-American, a non-binary person, men, and women, and there's certainly a lot of activism between them. I've loved their political pieces, and a few recent shows stuck me as perhaps even too political, but the group has always seemed to prioritize an interesting and entertaining theatrical experience and that's what keeps me coming back.

I'm curious to see what the ensemble replaces Too Much Light with. Hopefully it's a concept with just as much of a hook and just as much power.
posted by LSK at 9:53 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Too Much Trump Makes the Founder Go Mad
posted by eschatfische at 10:07 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

I should specify that, at the ensemble level, the angry WTF's I mentioned seem focused on Allen.
posted by dagosto at 10:18 PM on November 30, 2016

Are the other city groups close enough that they'd likely all switch to doing something else together? Or do they seem likely to keep this up in New York and elsewhere as long as he leaves them the license? I've only ever heard about this very peripherally and I knew it was in multiple cities but I think I assumed they were more closely affiliated than this.
posted by Sequence at 10:19 PM on November 30, 2016

Do the Neofuturists have other things going on? I went once, enjoyed the hell out of it, but never really knew much about them, and hadn't ever really considered that they were a separate entity from Too Much Light. Without TML, what will they do? Have they made any announcement as to what they'll be doing after TML ends?
posted by Ghidorah at 10:26 PM on November 30, 2016

If this is really just about the trademark not being licensed, I absolutely don't see why they can't rebrand with a different name and keep on doing the 30 plays in 60 minutes thing. Trademark law might restrict the mark and branding, but it says nothing about the idea/expression/concept.
posted by naju at 10:48 PM on November 30, 2016

I had no idea it was still going -- it's been 15-20 years since I last went (it got a little harder to attend once I moved to the west coast..)

Was the price of your admission still determined by rolling dice?
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:49 PM on November 30, 2016

On reflection, maybe it's just that Chicago is too small of a city for there to be two versions of Too Much Light, and they have no desire to be framed as the "less social justicey, more fun" one.
posted by naju at 10:52 PM on November 30, 2016

Was the price of your admission still determined by rolling dice?

Yes, it is. I just looked at their website and the price is $9 plus whatever you roll on a D6, price range of $10-15.
posted by hippybear at 2:23 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is one of those things that I heard about long ago and have heard about it every few years along the way and always go "what the hell, oh yeah, it's THAT thing"!

I really don't know what to make of this whole front office political thing going on with the production. But I'm happy to have been reminded about this thing I've heard about so many times but never sticks in my brain. Maybe this time it will!
posted by hippybear at 2:27 AM on December 1, 2016

Megan Mercier, a former ensemble member and Artistic Director, wrote a pretty damning insider take on this.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 5:15 AM on December 1, 2016 [20 favorites]

> If anything, Too Much Light over this last year has struck me as overwhelmingly political and diverse - the ensemble includes an African-American, an Asian-American, a non-binary person, men, and women, and there's certainly a lot of activism between them.

Yep, this this this. I saw the show for the first time this summer and it was fantastic, the cast very diverse, and the content certainly quite political. WTF?
posted by desuetude at 6:41 AM on December 1, 2016

Until this moment, all I knew of the NeoFuturists was Bingo the Clown-O.

Now I has a sad :(.
posted by JohnFromGR at 7:29 AM on December 1, 2016

I've never been to Too Much Light in Chicago, but I've been to the SF one a few times and gotten to know some of the current and former cast members. From the beginning, the SF Neofuturists were really open about wanting to make the cast more inclusive. At one of their shows, they even passed around notebooks and asked people to write names of artists of color they should reach out to.

I'm not sure what to say about this situation. My gut reaction is to say that Allen probably could have probably gotten more involved with the company again rather than pulling the plug on it, but it's hard to tell from this distance.

I also think that the existing company should rebrand, but they'll need to change up the constraints of the show a little bit. If they keep the same format, casual theatregoers will see it as a knockoff of Too Much Light.
posted by roll truck roll at 7:36 AM on December 1, 2016

Anyone else remember the woman who made a bagel with her belly button? So many complicated feelings....
posted by answergrape at 7:44 AM on December 1, 2016

Just want to emphasize the Megan Mercier article linked above, in which she comes thisclose to calling out Allen as a "missing stair" in the Neo-Futurists:

"As a young woman joining the company, it seemed that foremost on almost everyone’s mind was not only teaching me how to be a member of the company, but how also to protect myself from Greg Allen. By this point he was notorious for a litany of antics..."

Reading between the lines, it seems like when Allen stopped directly participating with the Neo-Futurists, he still held the license to TML over their heads to prevent them from speaking out about him. Now that that's over I expect the dam to break in the next few weeks, and more stories to come out.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:58 AM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

JustKeepSwimming's post provides the necessary history to make sense of this. Essentially - there was an issue with the founder Allen, and he was silently suspended (to hide the dirt) and now he's decided that the only place there is a problem is Chicago so only they lose their license.

I did not see this show (for the same reason I found Seinfeld and Simpsons tiring - packing as much cultural detritus is a party trick to entertain all of those who have read the same books or seen the same shows*), and will not see this show before it ends. I look forward to a new production. Let's not get too sentimental.

*And I'm just running out of time on earth. There's that.
posted by zenon at 10:09 AM on December 1, 2016

.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:26 AM on December 1, 2016

> If you haven't seen the show, how do you know that it's just packing cultural detritus?

Agreed, I'm really confused by this assessment and even more confused about the Simpsons and Seinfeld comparison. I think you may have developed a skewed impression of how the show works?
posted by desuetude at 11:37 AM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

.

This really kills me. I saw it in 2005 for the first time and was completely blown away. I can't tell you how many times I've been back, and it was always heartfelt, political, funny, and dramatic in all the best ways.
posted by turtlebackriding at 11:49 AM on December 1, 2016

> Anyone else remember the woman who made a bagel with her belly button? So many complicated feelings....

That would be Ayun Halliday.
posted by kgander at 12:24 PM on December 1, 2016

maybe it's just that Chicago is too small of a city

The third largest city in the U.S. is not a small city. I'm astounded at how many times I've seen my city referred to as small.
posted by agregoli at 12:33 PM on December 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Okay okay so metropolitan area is 3rd largest. But we ain't small.
posted by agregoli at 12:34 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

My tolerance for improv - even world class improv created by people I almost entirely agree with - is pretty limited. But my tolerance for entitled, obnoxious twits who settle theater disputes with press releases is far more limited.

Here's hoping the neo-futurists (or neo-neo-fututists, or paleo-futurists) rename their 30 plays in 60 minutes program and it takes off. I'm voting for "too much press makes the father of neo-futurism a sad boy," if audience members get a vote.

Also, US trademark law remains as stifling and badly designed as ever.
posted by eotvos at 12:38 PM on December 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Did they ever try 2D6 pricing?
posted by ZeusHumms at 1:19 PM on December 1, 2016

I've made a point of seeing Too Much Light at least once every time it visits DC and was always blown away. I'm sorry that the creator's apparently abusive behavior, and the long-delayed fallout from that, has led to this.

.
posted by X-Himy at 1:39 PM on December 1, 2016

I did not see this show (for the same reason I found Seinfeld and Simpsons tiring - packing as much cultural detritus is a party trick to entertain all of those who have read the same books or seen the same shows*), and will not see this show before it ends.

@zenon you've been missing out; the show is absolutely nothing like what you're describing. Hugely personal, poignant works, plus short sketches and bursts of avant garde. I don't go every year, but in 15 years of attending, with revolving casts and of course revolving plays (they roll another dice and remove/replace x number of plays each week so every couple months it's a completely different show), I can count the cultural or entertainment references on maybe one hand. You should check it out if you're in Chicago, enjoy theater at all, and have a chance.
posted by elr at 4:33 PM on December 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

I have SO MANY feels about this.

I love the Neo-Futurists to an unhealthy extent. Really, if you tell me that some other, non-neo-futurist form of theater needs to exist or is more essential, I will fight you. (This isn't a position based on argument. It's a position based on love. I WILL FIGHT YOU.)

I was watching fellow summer campers in the '90s doing Neo-Futurist plays as their final projects. (Picked by the counselors, I should add. At the time, I can't really claim they seemed that cool, but children have no taste.) A friend mounted a run of TML in college at our theater. I volunteered for TML while living in Chicago and took courses at the Neo-Futurarium, one of which was taught by Greg and the other of which had Kurt Chiang as a student. (This was before he joined the company, though it seemed like an obvious move at the time.) I got the Neos to visit grad school to mount a production of TML for a weekend and couldn't comprehend how the show the show wasn't sold out every night. (I was embarrassingly perplexed that a school with an excellent drama program couldn't sell out the house every night. My mind was blown. These idiot undergrads! But fanatics are poor salespeople.)

Frankly, the Neo-Futurists sort of killed my interest in working on theater in any real sense because it felt like I could labor over putting together sets and going to tech rehearsals and mounting shows or I could volunteer for this one company on a regular -a weekly- basis, selling snacks and distributing tokens and cleaning up, and get more-or-less the exact same positive vibe of being connected to something great and powerful and moving. Entirely peripherally, absolutely, but that didn't matter. To be peripherally connected to a great blue whale instead of being just another fish. (I fully acknowledge this is an unfair view of the many other hard-scrabble working theater companies out there. I don't care. The heart and brain are irrational.)

This weird show was as blatantly a relic of the '80s as a comic standing in front of a brick wall. And yet it was fresh! It was sincere and honest and often had bits that were too blunt &/or dumb by half. (A Short 'Honey-Do' List For Chicago's Mayor: Tif pins a note to the back of the theater's wall that reads "Please Quit.") And often it had monologues that are juuuust too long to print here and were essentially Twitter before it was Twitter, but in your face and with motion. (A monologue about Jesse Owens, "The Buckeye", as people pantomime running. A semi-improvised discussion of a first communion.) Sometimes it was just a little clever idea that worked perfectly, or a bit of poetry. (Why does "Under The Orotund Sun" stick with me? I don't know, beyond the shape of the words. Greg Allen's long musing on what it means when he says "Hello". The play where they passed the evening's take around the audience, giving people the option to take money, while talking about how the Neo-Futurist who wrote the play steals when he uses the self-checkout.) We see so many plays for particular big monologues or dialogue scenes, why not see thirty plays in sixty minutes with the expectation that only one or two will resonate beyond the evening? (Oh, and that pricelessly stupid play where a neo-futurist, who has just done a play about her spanish-speaking mother, describes walking up and feeling wonderful and then realizing that she had shat the bed. Entirely dumb. Entirely great.)

Do you know how, after you see a musical, you can go through a weird phase of not understanding why musicals aren't omnipresent? Imagine that but for short-form plays. Why aren't morning meetings plays? Why should we keep diaries, when we can just write tiny plays? Why shouldn't everything just be short dramatic reinterpretations of the present? I'd at times imagine becoming a Neo-Futurist, but then I'd also acknowledge that I lacked the courage to live the kind of seat-of-your-pants existence that that kind of artistic devotion required. (I lacked the acting chops too, but those are, I think, less crucial.) Instead, I'd see the show on a disturbingly regular basis -often enough to keep track of when shows were dropped from or added to the menu- and I'd make small talk like the company members knew who I was, even though roughly none had any idea. (The world of volunteering for the Neos -or my world of doing so- was a strange, shadow one, a weird niche fandom devoted to the particular dramatic styles of actor/writers that most people don't remember. ("That was Bilal's play? Really? It's so different from his usual material."))

Stephen Colbert was admitted to the Neo-Futurists, and he'd have joined if he hadn't been called up to the Daily Show. A bit of trivia, and an interesting parallel universe.

For all my love, I was/am obviously entirely peripheral. (The first time I saw Kurt after he had become artistic director, it was a moment of "Oh! You! Right! From so many years ago! Who are you again?") I certainly didn't have any idea of Greg and the company's mutual antipathy, though it was running hot back when I was around, and it turns out that other volunteers were quite aware that he was a Bad Dude. This mess is a bit like finding out that your Mom & Dad have just been staying together for your benefit, or that your house was built on quicksand, or, I dunno, only reading the Upshot in advance of the 2016 election. I don't really know how to process it. Both the Chicago Neos and Greg will probably continue to do fine with the aesthetic. (Being an asshole does not, alas, preclude talent, and the only real thing I can do is never go to see any production with which he is connected. Which is fine.) I should probably go ahead and get a Token for the Neos, even if I'll never use it, just to support. (First I should purchase all my unbought collections of TML play scripts - who needed the scripts when the show was alive?) But the general idea that this thing that has been such a fixture of my concept of what's good in art - of how you can do better effects than on Broadway with some Christmas lights, or silly string, or confetti, or that your theater really only needs to have a few PAR Cans with a tiny light board somewhere in the back, or that a play can be just thirty seconds long and still be perfect- will be going away - damn. Even if it wasn't a real Chicago community for me, it was a Chicago community that existed in my mind, and its existence gave me heart and a way of processing my surroundings.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:21 PM on December 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

Passionate comments like the one above this one here are why I love MetaFilter. I regret that I have but one favorite to give.
posted by hippybear at 3:41 AM on December 2, 2016

The third largest city in the U.S. is not a small city. I'm astounded at how many times I've seen my city referred to as small.

I didn't mean it as a putdown! I spent years in the music scene there and generally people agreed that it's culturally "small" in the sense that everyone knows each other and there's a ton of overlap in creative/arts circles.
posted by naju at 11:20 AM on December 2, 2016

MetaFilter: generally people agreed that it's culturally "small" in the sense that everyone knows each other and there's a ton of overlap
posted by hippybear at 11:43 AM on December 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

MetaFilter: prefers deep dish over large, thin slices.
posted by ZeusHumms at 2:14 PM on December 2, 2016

(Incidentally, the neo-futurists have (re-)launched a fundraiser for support.)
posted by Going To Maine at 1:35 PM on December 5, 2016

The New York and San Francisco Neo-Futurists have decided to end their runs of Too Much Light and join in with Chicago on a new project.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 6:29 PM on December 12, 2016 [2 favorites]